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It’s a mistake to confuse a poet’s lines with the man himself.
A man can compose the noblest verses and still be a first-rate villain. Many do and are. When the composition itself is awful, awesome, a masterpiece of maleficence, building with its mighty verses a towering altar of ambition soaked with innocent blood…it may be better not to know the man, even if he proves any kinder.
Yet it’s a temptation. Especially to one who knows the limits of knowing a poet through his work—one familiar with how something of the soul slips in with the ink, but always obscurely, never absent, never entirely certain.
If one can know anything of a man by his words, Kit Marlowe must be the devil.
“Protestants, of course, are all hypocritical asses. The Catholics are simply asses! See how they keep falling for the cajoleries of Protestant projectors, tempted into treason. If only they kept to burning their candles and singing their hymns, all might go well…”
Embers glow in a clay bowl cupped between ink-stained knuckles. Smoke drifts like dark incense to the soot-stained rafters overhead. The tavern windows’ oiled parchment makes a poor substitute, even in parody, for the stained glass that once graced churches like Stratford’s—long since removed, rarely remembered. But this darkly bright scene echoes, if only in Will’s mind, richer and higher things.
The pipe was lit with a makeshift spill, paper torn from the wall outside, rolled, and set afire—a pamphlet advertising a play or an edict he disapproved of. Not a page from the Bible, although rumors of how Marlowe’s lit that pipe before drift like the smoke. If it had been, it’s not as if any in this gathering would be appalled. No second Gosson sits at either of these tables, eager to gather ammunition for another pleasant invective against the school of abuse and those who write its catechisms.
Instead, Marlowe is in the midst of his fellow poets and university men (of course, Gosson is one of those too), and not far away lies a table full of players. And here, in a small space in the shadows between the two, sits a man who is something of both.
As his companions laugh and one ventures to extend his opinion, Marlowe’s eyes pass across the room. They settle on Will’s. Because he doesn’t think to look away, or want to. Because Will lacks the inclination, along with caution.
He thinks of caution only now as the man comes close, with a smooth stride that covers ground rapidly yet appears languid, leonine.
He settles on the bench next to Will and raises the pipe. “Would you like to try?”
“Not if it makes you like this.” Mad and scoffing with prophetical spirits of Merlin’s race, as some have said.
When he shakes his head in a laugh, tallow lights set his brown hair flashing with tints of red. “God made me like this,” he says, “if He made me at all.”
“Himself to mar,” Will mutters.
Marlowe’s eyes grow. Perhaps he will take credit for the marring himself. But he says, “So there is no need for introductions.”
Meaning he recognizes Will, too. Of course, he’s likely seen him on the stage.
“What brings you here?” he continues. “Are you trying the style of a company-keeper?”
Will’s become known, by those who know him, for making his excuses when confronted with an invitation. There’s always a pain to fall back on—in his head, his gut, his legs, his cramped hands. So, although he might join either the players’ table or the poets’ for a few hours, so far he has done neither.
This evening, there’s a tale to be written. There’s always a tale, of course. But this one hides and flirts, the words to tell it ghosting across the membranes of his mind without being caught. Rather than sit in his cramped room looking for them on an empty paper, he thought to seek fresher air.
Well, not fresh, exactly.
A column of smoke rises from Marlowe’s lips. “They say you will not be debauched.” His voice goes bright and soft with speculation. “I think you imitate the sun.”
Will blinks. “What?” Instinctively, he wants to say, You’ll find me nothing like the sun—but what is it he fears? Only a poet, weaving a conceit. But from him, and for him, something he’s never had happen before.
“You permit the base, contagious clouds to smother up your beauty from the world.” The last words fall with a certain rhythm, in a mighty line—although Marlowe’s never declaimed on a stage, never resorted for provision to the public means which public manners breed. No, his manners are rather personal, singular. And he knows it, with his mouth twisted in a self-recognizing smirk as another cloud breathes from it. “And thus when you please to show yourself, being wanted, you are more wondered at.”
“Wanted?” Will says.
He shrugs. “I cannot speak for others. For myself, that like I best that flies beyond my reach.”
“Not me, then.” His tone is soft; it would not be politic to sound more forbidding, nor, for reasons Will doesn’t care to examine, desirable. “For here I am.”
The response, not a rebuke, makes Marlowe drop his gaze, and this talk of liking. Will lifts a hand to wave the smoke away and gestures toward the pipe. “It’s bad for a choleric disposition. The vapors that rise to the brain are too dry, and I read of a man whose veins, after death, were found clogged with soot like an ill-maintained chimney.”
Marlowe’s eyebrows hike; then, another shrug. “What destroys me may also nourish.”
“But what does it nourish?”
“I’m sure you’ve also read of how it inspires energy in the mind—”
“Like drink does.”
He gestures with the stem of the pipe to the mug at Will’s elbow. “Yes, like wine. Not that we object.” He glances back at his fellows, who chuckle at words that, said in such a low, warm voice, must escape their hearing even as they evade Will’s understanding. “Some find it holy. With the appropriate ceremonies.”
Christ, spare him this talk of religion. Let this cup of discussion of what’s in cups pass—
Against his will, Will smiles a bit, and Marlowe smiles back, twirling his pipe, and says, “I have plans to make a new communion.”
“I’ve heard,” Will says. “I’m sure you find it an excellent and admirable method, taking it in the form of tobacco.”
“Let us avoid the controversy of its divine or mundane substance,” Marlowe says, “and simply agree that those who love it not are fools.”
“Like the fools,” Will asks, talking of religion after all, instead of other foolishness Marlowe might draw him to, “who say, in their hearts, ‘There is no God’?”
“Oh, dear me, Master Shakespeare—are you one of those who will absent himself from my company in fear for the rumors that I’ve taught the scholars of my school to spell that name backward?”
“But dear me, Master Marlowe, did you have to hold their pens to their hornbooks to show them how to shape those three letters?”
Laughing, he raises a hand as if to clap Will on the shoulder, then stops. Catches himself, perhaps. Spares Will, truly.
Spares him the physical contact, but not his words. “Perhaps you’ve heard the other school of men who are fools in my book. Would that be a reason for you to sit apart from me?”
I would expect you to sit apart from a mere player, Will could demur here. But that would be dangerous too, because there is one reason classes of men might mix, for an evening—or a night: the reason Marlowe hints at. Those Will would not count himself a part of…married as he is…and despite the poetry he writes, of the beautiful Adonis, and the sonnets to the youth whose face he sees when he tries to picture Venus’s beloved.
Is it possible then to be only half a fool?
Will is not afraid at such thoughts. Not precisely. And even as he does not want Marlowe to know he has them, nor does he want the poet to see him shying from them. And so he approaches them, but under the guide of their topic, religion—as if that were less dangerous.
“I have also heard about your theories of our savior’s extraordinary love.”
“Do they not fill you with reverence and trembling?”
“You mock me,” Will says frankly.
“Not at all. I admire you. It’s been too long since I could speak with an educated mind so honestly.”
Will’s famously uneducated, by the standards of this lot, but never mind that. “Of pipes and of…?” Of something so unspeakable that even he cannot find words for it yet.
“Of Saint John as an Alexis?” Marlowe puffs at the dimming pipe some more, trying to keep it alight. Even that movement of his mouth appears somehow mocking—lips moving in a confident, sensuous gesture.
“And we all know who you would have play Corydon.”
“Another shepherd, is that not so?”
Certainly, it’s not the most disparaging way Christopher Marlowe has ever referred to Christ.
“I feel a sympathy for Corydon,” Marlowe says. Then—not winking with his eyes, but somehow in his words—“After all, I am writing a poem now based on his beguiling invitation. Oh, Alexis, come live with me and be my love…”
“Safer to rewrite Virgil than the Gospel.” Will nods as if in approval. Not incapable of mockery himself.
Marlowe’s eyes fly open wider, as if Will has landed a palpable hit. “Safer? I don’t decide my poems out of fear of bugbears and jugglers. For all it’s the first beginning of religion to keep men in awe.”
“The first beginning?” Will focuses on the words rather than their more dangerous meaning. Not able to say himself if he is trying to dissuade, or simply baiting, or the one baited. But he does want to keep Marlowe talking, would like to detain him at this table rather than see him return to his laughing, educated, poetic fellows, who have now bent over a game of dice one of them brought out. “What then, I wonder, would be its second beginning?”
“Obviously,” Marlowe says, “to make money.”
For the first time in several minutes, he puffs at his pipe—smokelessly. Frowning, he turns it over, taps the ashes from the clay bowl, and opens his pouch for more tobacco to tamp down.
While he watches this process, Will observes, “That seems a mortal prerogative.” One Will himself has been quite invested in.
“So it is. Often, I’ve heard, a royal one.” Marlowe looks for another spill to relight his pipe. Without thinking, Will tears a corner from the paper folded in his pouch—paper he planned to write on, should the Muse visit him tonight among this crowd.
Marlowe accepts it with a nod for thanks. Soon he inhales a stream of smoke, breaths it out in two grey snakes from his nostrils. The candle he lit the spill from sends more bright gleams across his hair; the light could put one in mind of Lucifer before his fall. “My friend Hariot interviewed the peoples of the New World, the cultivators of this herb. Most admirable nations. And Hariot himself, I’ve often said, is a magician far superior to Moses.”
“Or simply more lucrative?” Will’s heard of what Marlowe has said about the “jugglers” of the Old Testament, just as he’s heard of what he’s said about the heroes of the New being sodomites, and those of this age who are not sodomites being fools. Indeed, he’s heard a fair measure of the precise Marloweism this man keeps as his only religion. Enough, one would think, to warn him away.
“Not that lucrative, poor Thomas. Another victim to that curse of the ancient Fates, that we followers of Mercury and Poverty should always kiss, so that every scholar be poor.”
“Perhaps you should turn to religion, then,” Will baits.
Marlowe chuckles. “My scholarship was meant to fit me for a priest. You see its shortcomings?”
He shakes his head in agreement. “Nothing could fit you for that.”
“I blush at your compliments, Master Shakespeare.”
He drops his gaze, as if in fear—for one thing, with the introduction of money, that Marlowe might seize this opportunity to ask for a loan to cover this evening’s supper and drink.
Marlowe catches his hesitation. “But shall we bid divinity adieu and speak more on a subject you find happier?”
“Would you venture to find one?” he parries.
“If I can’t please you, Master Shakespeare, I shall at least please myself. A happy thought I’ve had, regarding this mortal prerogative, is that if my plays don’t please enough and mint enough in pennies from the galleries, I’ve learned some tricks from a man named Poole in Newgate I might find the opportunity to practice.”
Will tries to hide his reaction, a jerk that would otherwise unsettle the table. His teasing defiance has dared Marlowe to find as unhappy a subject as he could muster. In a breath he has spoken of counterfeiting and of his arrest the year before—after the death, by violence intentional or otherwise, of William Bradley. Marlowe had claimed he killed the man in defense of his friend Tom Watson, and to be sure Will is glad Watson survived (his warm feelings toward the man may stem in part from the silver voice of his patron praising the first lines in his tale of Venus and Adonis as “worthy of Watson’s heir”). Either Marlowe’s defense, or a friend in high places, ensured he did not dance at the end of a hempen rope for Bradley’s death—but for false coinage?
“A royal prerogative indeed,” he says. In either warning—as if Marlowe would heed one—or at least in protest, should this all be some project to catch him out in treason. Yes, he’s heard the rumors of Marlowe’s past as a projector, too.
Why else would Marlowe speak of such vulnerable topics with a player who refuses to be debauched?
“And what is royalty but a matter of sic volo, sic jubeo? Might first made kings. And so it may make counterfeit nobles, and crowns, and angels.”
Speaking not of rights or religion but of the denominations of currency. At least Will will pretend it’s only that. “You,” he tells Marlowe, “will surpass all angels in matters of honesty.”
His eyes—a strange pale color, difficult to make out in the shadowed tavern—take on a gleam like the pipe smoke does in firelight. Will continues, for once, before Marlowe composes a reply.
“It seems you must have liberty, as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom you please, as fools have.” Speaking of pipe smoke, he waves away another stream of it, blown his way in surprise. “To speak openly of learning to mimic the prerogatives of our queen, where anyone can hear—” He even looks around as if to see if anyone has. But Marlowe’s friends are caught up in their game, the players are turning out their purses to settle the bill, and the next nearest table is occupied by a man dressed in high fashion for the countryside falling prey to a much less fashionable coney-catcher spinning some trick to trap him. Still, “It’s dangerous,” he finishes weakly.
Marlowe leans close. Very close. And he whispers, his breath warm and wet on the curve of Will’s ear, “I know!”
His laughter shivers in the hearing shell and down Will’s spine.
It is a feeling much like fear. “Would you condemn your life for liberty of speech?”
Marlowe, sitting back, only shrugs. “I am not without the right to.”
And for some reason, despite all the dangerous things he’s said before, it is these words that catch Will’s breath, that make the blood chill as it enters his heart. Not without right.
The recklessness of it. The pride. The courage…
Will waves away more smoke from that damned pipe as it drifts toward his face. “Indeed, you don’t seem to care at all for your future, if you have one. Think you the soot in your lungs will only trouble you if you live too long?”
Marlowe lowers the pipe, if only for a few moments. “I fear I have unsettled your own constitution. I proffer my apologies if I’ve made of something, nothing by too much augmenting it.”
Like a counterfeiter gilding dross, or any fool speaking so much stupidity that it spoils a conversation. Is the conversation spoiled? Even in Marlowe’s half-apology, Will hears something more—words that need not be spoken: You are the kind, Master Shakespeare, who will die in bed, older, but not old enough to have lived.
Surely not. But if so, would that be such an evil fate?
Why does Will want to protest it?
And how could he?
And how has he found himself so entangled in words with this man he’s never spoken to before today—a man he’s known of, but never thought to know; indeed, perhaps should have known better than to become known to—as to argue with and be taunted by him, to fence with words and to warn? In short, to become concerned with him? To care if he chars his lungs or dons a hempen necklace? To fear when he comes too close?
“I only fear you have become too presumptuous,” he says at last.
Marlowe smiles, thinly but with a genuine gleam in his eyes. “Many have delighted in presumption.” However, he tips his head back this time as he exhales, sparing Will the presumption of more smoke in his face. “I always suspected they did, and Tamburlaine’s reception in this city seems to prove it.”
If one discourse has wearied this earth more than poets on their poverty, surely it is poets on their plays. Still, a less perilous topic than counterfeiting. And there is something about Marlowe’s tone and expression when he speaks of Tamburlaine—pride, yes, but not unearned. Not without right.
However much Will may envy his success, he cannot deny his right to it.
“What means this devilish shepherd to aspire with such a giantly presumption, to cast up hills against the face of heaven and dare the force of angry Jupiter?” he recites from memory. Marlowe’s eyes widen, and then his mouth, in a grin.
“A presumptuous pair of us, aren’t we?” he says—returning the flattery of pairing them for the flattery of hearing his own words recited? Or warning Will off from presumption? –But from what kind? Why does Will feel he needs to be warned off?
He inhales sharply on the pipe and continues with a seep of smoke, “Cast up the hills against the face of heaven… Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, and hide me from the heavy wrath of God. –Something new,” he explains. “That’s been on my mind…and should be on my paper, soon, to save me from the heavy wrath of creditors.”
“Ah,” Will says. “Yes.” His first impulse is to thank Marlowe for sharing the line, the brief glimpse of his next work. It’s not recited as smoothly as a player would, but with its own thrumming force on the poet’s lips. His second impulse is more cautious, as he’s learned from experience to be wary when player or poet mentions creditors.
To put off that request for a loan he fears, he even considers referring to his own creditors—who do not exist; the glover’s boy from Stratford, Anne’s husband, has known to be careful of coin. Even parsimonious. Another reason behind his excuses that keep him home at work rather than in these taverns drinking all afternoon.
“It certainly fuels ambition, an empty purse,” Marlowe says wryly. “Have you ever noticed in the engravings how the prodigal son holds his purse so near the bottom?”
“I hadn’t,” Will admits.
Marlowe chuckles, then recites:
“My wish, and will, are still to mount aloft
—my want and woe deny me my desire
I flew there faste whose wit and learning oft
excel, and would to high estate aspire
but povertie, with heavy clog of care
still pulls them down when they ascending are.”
Still not with a player’s skill, but with his own bombast—a pleasure in the worlds that caresses them as they pass his lips. It’s no hardship to listen to.
But a shiver passes up Will’s spine. Not just at Marlowe’s apparent needy nothing trimmed in jollity. And if they drew attention from the dicing and reckoning around them—they don’t—reciting a rueful favorite from Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes is not the most dangerous way to do so.
Perhaps at the way he said my wish, and will as if the latter were a name. As if inviting him to mount aloft.
The question now appears to be whether Marlowe is trying to work his way into Will’s purse or into his bed.
He forces the thought from his mind like tobacco vapors from his lungs—as clouding and confusion-caused.
Let Marlowe fill his purse by counterfeiting, then, and his bed by means hardly less dangerous. It should have nothing to do with Will.
“There must be a limit to ambition,” he says.
“Would you know?” Marlowe asks. “You who…” His eyes sweep over Will before returning to meet his gaze. “Will do such things—what they are yet, we know not—but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”
“Do you think so?” Will replies.
He’d thought himself known more as a quiet shirker from company than an aspiring upstart. Yet Greene’s ink-smears of accusation spread through London—forgotten by most as such provocations are, but lingering in others’ memories. A tiger in a player’s hide. Well, Marlowe would like tigers. And terrors to the world—he’s used that line or something like it several times in his plays.
Will admits it has a powerful ring.
Marlowe smiles as if hearing his thoughts. He raises the pipe to his lips, inhales from it again. Will finds his eyes drawn to his mouth, watching its mobility. It must taste of smoke…and yet seems soft…
He shakes his head. “Whatever my achievements will be, it matters little beside what others might do in their ambition—ruffians, as their fancies wrought, would shark on one another.”
Though he doesn’t take his mouth from the pipe to answer, Marlowe’s eyebrows rise, and he nods as if acknowledging a point. Or perhaps only appreciating the turn of phrase. Will doesn’t dislike it himself. It’s a pleasure, this grasping of words and shaping them into argument. He can’t even feel self-conscious at being seen in the midst of it by this fellow practitioner of the art.
Or care that he’s shaping them into the air of this room and not on paper, that he owes his patron the completion of a poem and instead is doing this.
“Indeed,” he continues, “the heavens themselves, the planets and this their center, observe degree, priority, and place.”
“Do they so? And what of Saturn, Mars, or Jupiter—are their names feigned, these erring stars?” Marlowe chuckles around the pipe, and again Will watches the curve of his lips. “Or will you scourge these bad revolting stars?”
He wrote in Tamburlaine of souls with the faculty to measure each wandering planet’s course—and yes, Will could point out that even the wandering stars have courses—but Marlowe saw those souls striving merely for the fruition of earthly crowns. Golden ones, no doubt.
“But I think you would do that,” Will responds.
“Me? Why?”
“I imagine you would make the stars guilty of your disasters whenever you are sick in fortune.” Like now, he does not say, knowing not to overplay his hand—like the young man trapped by the coney-catcher’s rigged game at the next table—in pointing out the obvious.
“Alas for my poor fortunes.” Marlowe laughs again, this time so heartily he has to grasp his pipe so it does not fall from his mouth. He looks down at it, then up to Will. “Speaking of vapors—planetary and otherwise—will you not have any?”
Will shakes his head. In response, more laughter.
“Oh, unknit that threatening unkind brow! Anyone would think my offer were an insult.”
“Not at all. You’ve heard my objections, Master Marlowe.”
“I thought you might have overcome them since.”
Not yet. Though he watches the smoke slip past his lips and finds himself wondering…
“Perhaps your objections are less to the offer than to who offers it. After all, I am some foul contending rebel, graceless traitor to our loving lords."
"I don’t accuse you—” Will begins in a lower voice, then realizes Marlowe isn’t teasing him with treason so much as with his own words sent back to him. Those lines, from his Shrew, are spoken with as much zesty sarcasm as in their delivery by the boy who played Katharina.
“You accuse me,” Will says then. “You act as if I have no cheerful spirit even as you quote my own comedy at me.”
“Well, it can be a mistake to assume the playmaker is all that his play is.”
The thought echoes Will’s own from earlier too precisely to dismiss, but he parries. “Indeed. Your plays are rarely comedic, yet you…”
“Oh, it’s true, I could never write about taming a wife like you do. Any more than I could tame one, or wish to.” More irony in the tone—for he heard the boy’s sarcasm as well as Will (he’s been in the audience; Will’s heart pulses faster at the thought) and knows there is no taming for that Shew. “But you have your Anne.”
The pleasant rush of his blood turns sour. “What about her? She’s done nothing to become a target of gossip."
"No, no." Marlowe shakes his head, looking more serious than he has yet—for all that can be trusted. “I mean no offense, nor do any of us. We have only wondered at the wonder she must be, that you continue to resist debauchery.”
Will’s own lips twitch at the rhyme and its delivery, all but despite himself—indeed, despite his Will! A thought that brings another twitch to resist. Words dance for him again; he must write again, soon.
“Truly, though,” Marlowe says. “I hope it doesn’t embarrass you, but many know of the money you send back to Stratford, and that makes you a remarkable figure by the standards of this set.” He gestures round the room, at men drinking away the money sent by their families to London.
“My wife is…” He does not want to speak of his wife to Marlowe. Because… well, the obvious reason: she should not be a figure of gossip. Anne is a woman after her own governance, with a clear and steady way he’s always admired—a clarity he at times envies. But, with clarity, and with charity, she let him walk away, leaving her to her own governance, as free of his tyranny as he is of her claims. “The money is for our children’s sake,” he says.
“Children!”
“Twins, and an elder girl.” He smiles fondly to think of them.
Marlowe smiles too, and though this smile seems not to be mocking, he says nothing more—wisely. Because Will’s children are not to be laughed over either.
“I have an Anne, too,” Marlowe remarks. “A sister.”
Will once had a sister Anne, and buried her, but he is not ready to share that with one he isn’t close to.
Except he is close to Marlowe. If only in physical distance. They nearly breathe the same air, tobacco-tinted. And here Marlowe tells him about his family.
“She is a wonder,” he continues. “A brawler and a blasphemer. They sent me to Cambridge, I sometimes think, to save the world from the two of us together, with dagger and stave.”
Laughter bubbles from Will’s throat, innocent and cheerful—not surprised but delighted at this revelation. Let the ruffians shark if they are like this. “A mighty virago, worthy of the name of Anne!” Before Marlowe might ask if his Anne is a virago, he adds, “But surely you were sent to Cambridge for your virtues, not your vices.”
“And fetched my gentry from there, not from heraldry.”
The mention of Cambridge and heraldry together send Will’s mind astray. For the young lord, his patron—a loving lord, even, does Marlowe know of that too?—has also been to Cambridge. That well-taught lord, that lord well-done in every detail, whom Will writes untutored poetry for. Not just for the payment the family’s hired him with, but other payment if possible—a glimpse of that golden hair, praise in that silver voice, a smile from those blue eyes, or those lips that are…not as lively as Marlowe’s.
“Yet you needed no such education,” Marlowe says.
Despite their cheerful bandying of word for word, Will feels a flash of irritation at his interruption—as if by remaining silent a little longer he might have allowed him to resolve himself of ambiguities.
“Do you mean to flatter me, Master Marlowe?” His eyes narrow. “Or to mock?”
“Not at all. You hold your place among us, and not without right. Even if without heraldry.”
He shakes his head. His face heats, the deeper because it does not seem to be mockery, or flattery. Though Marlowe’s eyes gleam with pleasure.
And something about that phrase, not without right, moves him. Makes desire and its achievement seem such simple things.
“You’re one to speak of rights,” he says, falling back on their game, their feints with words. “Of rights and of a woman’s place, you who say you have as much right to coin as the queen.”
“Pray keep your voice down.” Marlowe does as he himself beseechs, as if realizing now, at last, the danger, and comes closer to Will along the bench to be heard. “You’re one to preach against ambition, as if you were as content to be bounded in a nutshell as to be king of infinite space.”
“The more fool I,” Will says, “for laying on your duty.”
“Well, let them obey who know not how to rule. This hand was made to handle naught but gold.” Marlowe waves his hand, the one not holding the pipe, between them—accomplishing naught but to disperse some of the smoke.
They laugh together, then. “If only that were true, for your sake,” Will remarks, in a tone he wonders at using to a man he’s not spoken to before tonight.
“Perhaps I need myself a patron the likes of yours,” Marlowe says. “Tom Walsingham is…” His expression softens a moment before he makes it merry again—“of much reckoning and worth, but not worth as much as rumor suggests your beloved lord is.”
“I had a great deal more peace before you told me how much of my life features in rumor,” Will says.
“Could you really be ignorant of it? You know we’re a gossiping lot.”
“Well, you know how much I absent myself from company.” Rumor could not possibly tell the parts Will most fears told—the parts he cannot voice himself. He breaths deep, taking in calm. And the odor of Marlowe’s tobacco, and some other scent under it, a human scent, not unpleasant. They sit so close.
“Do you do it to write?” Marlowe asks. “Is that the secret of your powers?”
“I write because if I do not, I, my wondrous wife, and my dear children will starve,” he says, only somewhat jesting. “And because if I do not, I will be buried in words demanding they be written, arguments crying out for hearing. And because I have duties as well as rights. The paragon of patronage you mention is owed a poem, you see, which I have not yet had time to finish—of Venus’s courting of Adonis, and his resistance to it.”
Why speak of resistance to courtship? He chooses his details with profusion but with care, when he’s dancing with words; why does that slip out?
Marlowe says, somewhat dryly, “Perhaps you will be fortunate and a plague will shut the theaters down, so you can focus on your poetry instead of plays long enough to please your beloved lord.”
Will shakes his head. He chuckles at the outrage of it. He wonders at the thoughts and words and feelings of this man. He exclaims, “Oh, what a mansion have those vices got which for their habitation chose out thee!”
Surprise crosses that face—the face of irreverent, ambitious, scoffing, proud, bold, pleasant Marlowe—so little like the gilded youth he writes poems for, or the self-governed woman in Stratford, who each have their part in inspiring his Adonis and Venus. But like his lord of love and his respectable wife, Marlowe has a certain force…call it force of will. He is more reckless in it than any Will has met—any who remain unhanged, at least—he dazzles in raptures of air and fire. And delight, added to those other brave translunary things, explains how the words that so surprised him had escaped Will’s lips in the first place.
With neither Anne nor with his lord has Will been able to toss words like dice, and find cheer in however they fall. That’s part of it. For all his power and her wisdom, neither his lord nor Anne ever left him feeling in their presence as if he stood before a blaze, touched by its heat. His words, his care, his duty have been the furnace they warm themselves at. He’s met no one with as strong conception and as clear a rage as he’s felt in this half-hour’s conversation. That must be it, because Marlowe, though bright with smoke and flame, lacks the beauty of Will’s young lord and the vibrant full-fleshedness of Anne’s body. He has a mind like a dagger and stave, slicing and bruising, and he has that mouth…
“I’ve been called many things, but not a mansion,” those lips shape now. “Blasphemer, reckless wretch, man-slaughterer, sodomite…”
“Have you ever been called a fool?” Will asks.
“No. Unless you meant to call me one for what I say in my heart about God—as if you know what I say in my heart, Master Shakespeare. But why do you ask?”
“I feel you implied I am one,” Will says, “about the time I referenced possible foolishness in your heart. Based on what I did not love. And—I do not think I am.”
Marlowe nods. The smiles and laughter have faded to a spark in his eyes. “But how do you know what you love unless you have tried it?”
“Perhaps I will try now. If you do not withdraw your generous offer.”
“Generous enough,” he says with that rueful note returned, looking down at the contents of his pipe. “This isn’t a mere penny’s worth, I must tell you. Though I know a way to stretch it out.”
“I’m not sure—” Will starts.
“If I filter it through my own lungs first, perhaps the worst of the poisons will be leached before they reach thy body so filled with graces.”
Better than a mansion of vices, Will must concede. But God, Marlowe’s mouth is dangerous—not least for what it makes his own do—and with some relief he sees it stopped by an inhalation from the pipe.
Marlowe leans closer yet, closing the last distance between them. Will does not startle. He is not surprised, exactly, as Marlowe puts his mouth to his.
Obediently, Will parts his lips. His hand settles at Marlowe’s nape, meant to steady…one of them, at least.
As delicious meat is to the taste, so is his neck to touch.
Marlowe clasps his shoulder as he opens his own lips, those surprisingly soft lips, slowly, keeping the seal between their mouths. He breathes the smoke into Will. Hot and acrid, yet aromatic, it pours past his lips. He almost swallows, but catches himself before choking and breathes instead. Somehow he must be doing it right, and thank God, if God can be thanked, because he doesn’t want to break them apart.
Do any of the others notice them? Does it matter if they do? He can’t answer; no space exists any longer beyond his flesh and where Marlowe touches it.
It passes between them, along with the air and fire, a fine madness. Will’s fingers close tighter on the back of Marlowe’s neck as if to pull him closer, as if that could be done, as if they are not chest to chest and breath to breath. At least the touch holds him where he is. As if Marlowe would draw away.
Well, perhaps he would. Will does not know the man, after all.
He takes it in, this ghost of ash, this intoxication, this inspiration, and with it something he will later remember as a premonition. An understanding that what he holds is as impossible to keep as smoke. He breathes it in, but can only hold it so long before releasing it.
Is this heat from the pipe’s embers, or of Marlowe’s breath?
Streams drift up from their lips, incense burned in the strangest rite he’s known.
“Thank you for the conversation, Master Shakespeare.” Marlowe sits back without releasing his hold on Will’s shoulder, or trying to get out of the grip from his hand.
“And thank you,” Will says, still not letting go, unsure where his words might lead, but trusting them now as he always has, “for the fire.”